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Comment by dobbsbob | Hacker News Reader

A loaf of bread where I live is $4. Blew his daily budget with one purchase. Cant buy single eggs even from a local farmers market here so thats another $4-6. Cheese is probably the most expensive item at $10. If you bought everything this guy ate youre looking at $60 or so and it will last about 5 days, which is 7gbp per day. Must be cheap food in the UK

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Well, the author bought everything in larger quantities while conveniently not taking into account limited shelf life. He also makes trips to 5 different supermarkets to get the cheapest prices, which takes a lot of time (research & shopping) and gas.

One of the best ways to cut costs is to not cook for one, but to cook together with others. Then you can buy in bulk like the author suggested.

I live alone and I do cook for one. I probably spend more on food than most. However, I chose to live in a compact city with relatively low rents. This way I don’t need a car. I live in walking distance of supermarkets, health food stores, farmers markets and bakeries. I live 1 minute from a bus stop, 5 minutes from the main train station. What I spend more on groceries, I make up for in low rent and using public transport instead of owning a car.

You can get by basically anywhere in Europe without a car. Sure, you might have to walk 20 or 30 minutes or so (one-way), but the wear on your shoes from that is absolutely negligible.

You'd have to walk for hours to check all the prices and work out the cheapest from various supermarkets though. Also, the more calories you burn walking across town to find, purchase, and carry home the very cheapest food, the more you need to eat...

Five kilometers sounds like a very sane maximum distance for shopping, which is manageable in one hour (two hours round trip). You don’t have to visit every shop each day, as the prices will be roughly the same and you can note new ones as you get to the shop the next time. Walking requires nearly no energy, compared to the standard energy requirements of the human body.

Also note that a bicycle for as little as £20 can speed up transportation immensely at nearly no cost (of course, you might want to invest a further £3 in chain lube, but, well).

That is simply not true.

I live in the third most densely populated country in Europe (after Monaco and Vatican City), the Netherlands. It has 1287 people per sq mile. Yet, the country has plenty of rural areas from where it takes hours to walk to the nearest town or even the nearest shop. Belgium, the UK, Germany, and Italy are ranked 4, 5, 7 and 9 respectively. They too have large rural areas.

In the less densely populated European countries, it’s even more problematic to live outside of a city without a car: Iceland (8 people per sq mile), Russia (21 people per sq mile), Norway (41 people per sq mile), Finland (48 people per sq mile), and Sweden (60 people per sq mile).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_de...

Clearly the commenter means in cities or towns, or generally inside the public transportation system.

I'm from Spain (and I have been to several other countries in Europe from the list you give.) I live in a small town (22000 inhabitants) and I don't have a car. Anything I need for day-to-day life I can find in town, for anything else I use public transport to get to Barcelona, which is just 30 minutes by train.

In most of Spain, except for the most rural places there are public buses that can get you from unheard-of-on-sea to closest-big-town without many problems, and my experience in Germany and UK is the same.

Of course Iceland and Norway are completely different, specially Iceland (I was there for 18 days) where from "big" city to the next you can count on seeing just a few farms, at best.

“Clearly the commenter means in cities or towns, or generally inside the public transportation system.”

I doubt that’s what he meant, because that wouldn’t be much of a statement to make. When you live in a town or city, of course you can walk to a grocery store – that’s not unique to Europe.

I lived in rural northern New Mexico, the 6th least densely populated state of the 50 United States. Even there, I could walk from my home to Wal*Mart, a nearby gas station/taquería or farmers market. Walking on the side of a state highway just isn’t much fun, especially at night.

There was a 3rd clause there: "or generally inside the public transportation system."

I didn't mention it because outside of built up areas, public transportation is practically non-existent. A bus service that runs every few hours and not at all on Sundays simply doesn't count. Also, OP spoke of walking, not of public transport. If I use a bicycle, motorcycle, airplane, or rocket, I don’t need a car — that wasn't what was proposed.

I guess in the US may be different, but in Europe people usually make the weekly food shop either during the week (after work or before work) or on Saturdays. Almost everything is closed on Sundays. Also, what do you mean by built-up areas? In Spain, Germany and UK (countries where I've spent most time) you can get to almost any place with public transportation. Maybe they come once an hour, but for planned shopping this should not be a problem.

This is the comment I responded to:

“You can get by basically anywhere in Europe without a car. Sure, you might have to walk 20 or 30 minutes or so (one-way), but the wear on your shoes from that is absolutely negligible.”

Ask yourself whether you agree with that statement, because it’s quite different from what you have been presenting.

I do. The original comment talks about living without a car. You may need to walk 20 or 30 minutes to get to the public transportation to get you to your destination, and this is what I have been presenting all over.

On one hand, I cannot recall a single village of more than, say, 1000 inhabitants (in Germany) which did not have a decent supermarket (Aldi, Lidl etc.) – at most, it might be at the other end of the village a few kilometers away, but, well.

On the other hand, you ignore that bicycles are perfectly fit for use as transportation, especially in rural areas with little traffic, reducing the need for a car even further. You can get as far as 20 km easily by bike (about an hour, tops), and I will be very surprised to learn of places where the next shop is more than 20 km[0]

Additionally, you ignore that the average population density of a country is no measure whatsoever of how said population is distributed – if the vast majority of the population live in villages and cities, it doesn’t matter whatsoever whether there are fifty trillion square miles of forest around them or not.

Futhermore, I have to admit that I did not necessarily consider Russia and Iceland to be part of Europe in this regard.

You’re moving the goalposts. I indicated I moved to a small city specifically not to have to own a car to shop for groceries. You seem to think that one can live anywhere in Europe and be within 2 miles (a 30 minute walk) of whatever amenities you need. That is simply not true.

My sister’s husband owns a home on an island in Norway which has been in his family for several generations. They spend several months a year there. There are no shops on the island at all, it takes more than an hour by boat to get to a supermarket. I’ve never visited Norway, but I’ve been told this is quite common.

“if the vast majority of the population live in villages and cities, it doesn’t matter whatsoever whether there are fifty trillion square miles of forest around them or not.”

It does matter to you, if you happen to live in or near a forest. In Iceland, two-thirds of the population lives in the Reykjavik area. If you live outside of that area, you absolutely need a car.

Living in Germany I can assure you that there are towns and villages spread out so far that getting to the nearest supermarket takes hours by foot. Bicycles are not an option, if you know what Mittelgebirge[1] means in practice, you know why and if you use public transportation in rural areas, every trip to the supermarket turns into an event that needs to be scheduled.

I didn't know what a ‘Mittelgebirge’ was, so I looked it up. Translated, it means ‘mid range mountainous area’, and there are plenty of those in Germany. In those areas, you definitely need a car to get to the nearest supermarket.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelgebirge

The trick to the author's math is this:

A loaf of bread has, say, 24 slices in it. If you ate two of them, then the cost of bread was that day $0.34, when you amortize the loaf of bread over twelve days. If you can find a $2 loaf of bread with 24 slices, it's only about $0.08 for a slice of bread.

But yes, I agree -- if you actually had to maintain this budget, you'd probably buy one kind of breakfast, lunch, and dinner and eat it every day for a week.

Here's a loaf from Tesco for fifty pence (seventy-seven US cents). Looks like twenty or so slices, so call it 2.5 pence per slice; about four cents a slice.

http://www.tesco.com/groceries/Product/Details/?id=262358089

As I recall, however, you have to be quick. The cheapest bread tends to vanish from the shelves within minutes of being put out.

Also, you have to pretty much vacuum seal them yourself to stop them going off in 3 days.

> The trick to the author's math

That's the trouble with this article; With the dependence on buying everything in bulk (and somehow using it all up before it goes off), it appears to be more of a fun theoretical calculation than a practical weekly diet.

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